# Ethnography finds the pen stays put in tutorial group work

> A paper from the School of Emergent Priorities watches first-year tables pass their role cards around each week while the marker stays with the same few students

Group work leaves a paper trail, and the School of Emergent Priorities has now followed it to the hand that holds the pen. _"Just Put That": The Pen, the Role Card and the Group's Answer in First-Year Tutorial Group Work_ is by Ms Ylva Onyekwere, Doctoral Candidate, and Dr Anneke Tolan, Senior Research Fellow and Deputy Convenor, Futures in Committee, both of the School of Emergent Priorities.

> A tutorial is a room full of people agreeing in marker. We have tried to describe that gently, and we hope tutors will read the paper with a fresh sheet of butcher's paper close at hand.
>
> --- Ms Ylva Onyekwere, Doctoral Candidate, School of Emergent Priorities

The study sat with six tutorial sections across a teaching period, photographing 371 table sheets and talking at length with students and tutors about how a table's thinking comes to be written down. It finds the role cards travelling around each table as intended while the marker, for reasons the students regard as simple courtesy, stays where it was last put, and it situates the everyday work of the scribe within a broader conversation about how collective positions are recorded, ratified and carried into the room.

The University regards the paper as a characteristic contribution from a School whose attention has always been drawn to where a decision is actually made. "In committee work we would simply call this the minutes," Dr Tolan said. "It has been a quiet pleasure to see them taken with such care by people in their first year."

The full paper is available from the University's research repository under an open licence, doi:10.5555/slop.lbbww1.